Recently I found some time to fiddle a little bit with CSS3D and I took the chance to restyle a little the company home page; normally I don’t do web based stuff, but I admit that all this super performant new stuff (I’m mainly thinking of WebGL and the possibility to use some GPU power in a webpage) is making javascript interesting again 🙂

While I’m here, I’ll also make a quick summary of all the things happened in the last months and that I was to busy (maybe also a little lazy?) to write about:

– During Milan’s Design Week I had the opportunity to give a hand with the setup of M.I.T. Tangible Media Group‘s Transform; needless to say it was an interesting toy to play with and a great way to spend a week with stimulating people;

Recently a client bought a Kinect to be used with an OpenFrameworks app I wrote for them; we were doing some normal depth tracking, so we did expect a smooth ride, but, after a few seconds from when the Kinect got plugged, the application froze.
To keep it short, it seems that the Kinect model 1473 (the one you’ll find in shops these days) comes with a new firmware that auto-disconnects the camera after a few seconds, causing a freeze whenever you plug it into a computer and try to use it with libfreenect; this of course means that most creative coding toolkits are affected by the problem: I did run into it using ofxKinect, but it will happen also with the libreenect based CinderBlock, Processinglibrary, etc…

Luckily Theo Watson already came up with a solution: you can find a fixed libfreenect here or, if you’re using OF, you can update to the last version on github.
The fix will work also with the Kinect for Windows and, of course, it will not break compatibility with the older 1414 Kinects.
Finally, if you don’t know the model of your Kinect, this picture will explain how to check it out:

TED.com just published the video of the last performance I coded for Marco Tempest.
As always the development process was really a stimulating experience: I had the opportunity to remodel an old project by the creative coding rockstar (and dad of OpenFrameworks) Zach Lieberman and teamed up with Kevin Blanc, one of the best art directors a coder could dream of.
The performance itself is a calibrated mixture of experimental augmented reality glasses, 3D special effects and card manipulation dexterity, but, as it often happens in Marco’s work, the narrative component is always central: every shuffle reveals a story hidden inside the deck of cards, following a tradition that dates back to a 19th century story called The Soldier’s Prayer Book. If you’re interested, Marco tells more about this story and about the narrative use of playing cards in an interview published on TEDBlog.

Marco Tempest just performed at TEDGlobal 2012 the show we prepared in the last 2 months. It was a revisitation of one of his classics: a mix of card tricks and augmented reality, realized with the help of a set of weareable devices, that we could describe as our own DIY reply to Google Glass.
I’ll post videos and more info soon, but for now you can check TEDblog’s post.

Some time ago I mentioned my collaboration with onFormative and AKQA to create Nike FuelStation in London: the installation just won the first place in the April 2012 CreativeShowcase contest 🙂
Everyone worked hard on this project, so it gives a good feeling to know that people is enjoying the experience we crafted for them:

Consumers made nearly 2,000 videos in the first month, moving more in a store than they’d ever done before. The installation got them hooked on the idea of Nike+ FuelBand, with 93% coming back to buy the product on release.